Saturday, August 23, 2003

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy / Funny, peculiar




Funny, peculiar

Shocking in its time, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy still resonates today


Carol Watts

Saturdady 23 August 2003


Tuesday, September 14 1762. In East Hoathly, a small Sussex village, Thomas Turner, the local shopkeeper, recorded the usual entry for the day in his diary. "At home all day and pretty busy. In the afternoon employed myself a-writing. In the even Mr Tipper read to me part of a - I know not what to call it but Tristram Shandy."

Turner was familiar with the staples of 18th-century reading, from sermons and Shakespeare to the matter of the monthly reviews. But his consternation at quite what it was that his friend had brought along that evening suggests something of the impact of the most fashionable book of the age: Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

As the first volumes of this comic, wayward narrative emerged in the early 1760s, many critics were none the wiser. It did not conform to the narrative conventions of the telling of a biographical "life", since it started at the unhappy point of conception and took pages for the main character to be born.

The figure of Parson Yorick, the double of its author, an Irish Church of England minister (whose popular collection of sermons would be published under this pseudonym), dies in volume one - his demise marked by a black page - only to reappear for the rest of the tale.

The author's preface appears in volume three, chapters are jumbled and missing, a dedication is hawked to the highest bidder, and at one point the reader is offered a blank page with the invitation to draw his or her own version of the sexually frustrated Widow Wadman: "as like your mistress as you can - as unlike your wife as conscience will let you".

The narrative appeared curiously fragmented by numerous digressions and stories. Punctuation ran riot, with a breathless use of dashes, asterisks and squiggly lines. It seemed both dizzyingly tied to the present moment, the narrator noting that he was living "364 times faster than I should write", and at the same time anachronistic in its nostalgia for the time of an earlier generation, the Shandy family household of 40 years before.

Horace Walpole was intrigued, deciding that its strategy involved "the whole narration always going backwards". "I can conceive of a man saying it would be droll to write a book in that manner," he continued, "but have no notion of his persevering in executing it." Samuel Johnson was dismissive. It was "not English, Sir". "Nothing odd will do for long," he later reflected. "Tristram Shandy did not last."

Sterne's difficulty in keeping the novelty going throughout the nine volumes and eight years of the novel's publication between 1759 and 1767 suggests that Johnson had a point. What he recognised was that the book was a creature of the market, vulnerable to literary fashion. With a neat classical epigraph from Horace - "All dare to write, who can or cannot read" - Johnson had noted in his journal The Adventurer in 1753 that "so widely is spread the itch of literary praise, that almost every man is an author, either in act or in purpose". Almost every woman too, for part of the crisis of this "epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper" was the rise of a generation of "Amazons of the pen".

Sterne's novel got under the skin of the public culture of its time. Its opening gambit, in which Mrs Shandy interrupts her husband as he religiously goes about his regular sexual duty on the first Sunday of the month with the euphemistic question "have you not forgot to wind up the clock?", reputedly changed relations between the sexes. As one pamphlet, The Clockmakers' Outcry, explained in 1760, no gentleman could wind his watch in public without a woman thinking he had designs on her, and the market for clocks was suffering. Many believed it, though the pamphlet may well have been written by Sterne himself, who knew the value of advertising.

Not only did the novel set numerous "writing mills a-going" in imitation, as one pamphlet had it, so many that its author had to authenticate with his signature all the copies of volumes five and six as they came off the press, it also reared its head in unexpected places. A racehorse was named after it, street ballads bawdily celebrated "playing Tristram Shandy, O!", financial tracts such as Thomas Mortimer's Every Man His Own Broker saw the stock market's susceptibility to rumour as a sign of the "reigning Shandean taste". Its author was feted in the best company, painted by Joshua Reynolds, and presented to the new king, George III.

Tristram Shandy's power to shock lay in its frank and comic acknowledgement of the libidinal energies that animated 18th-century life. In its exhortation to its readers, assembled "Sirs", "Worships" and especially "Madams", to "ride" the meaning of the narrative, Sterne called attention to the passional roots of the imagination, and to the "medicinal" nature of laughter, essential for the health of "the body politic as body natural". A scandalous line to take for a Yorkshire parson; decades later Sterne's writing was still seen by some as challenging the moral order of church and state.

But those who managed to read beyond the bawdy jokes and double meanings (which later anthologies such as The Beauties of Sterne quickly removed in favour of the more sentimental highlights), found something more: an acute satirical take on the "vices of the age" or, according to one comic pamphlet, a "political allegory" of its present, in which the nation had been plunged into a global war for empire, at great risk and cost to many, and huge commercial gain for a few.

If Tristram Shandy testifies to what we might now see as a culture fascinated by celebrity, it is also a critical response to those commercial forces that flow beyond the local trials of the book market to underpin economic adventurism and "curiosity" around the globe. What does it mean to be born into a world of risk and imaginative experiment, the novel seems to be asking, where the boundaries of the self and the body politic are suddenly remade? What are the human affections - the "trust" and "credit" - that bind people and their communities together, like readers and authors, in such a world? "Is a man to follow rules, or they to follow him?"

Sterne posed these questions in the form of an eccentric family saga, which is perhaps the nearest way of describing the story of Tristram Shandy. The son of a soldier who had died in Jamaica on an earlier campaign, Sterne had been used as a young child to the itinerant life of a military family, where the brutalities of 18th-century risk society were at their most intense. The child born into the pages of Tristram Shandy is surrounded by the anecdotal world view of a previous generation, above and below stairs, and in particular by the tales of the military veteran, uncle Toby, a patriot "of the old stamp" and bashful source of philanthropic feeling in the novel.Military veterans populate 18th-century fiction, often overly keen to relate their stories, as poet Charles Hanbury Williams describes in "The Old General": "If you name one of Marlboro's 10 campaigns, / He tells you its whole history for your pains." If there is something representative about Toby, he is also a register of a contemporary sense of grievance, since the Seven Years' war brought many discharged soldiers on to the streets, allowed to display their wounds and beg in shoddy recompense for their sacrifice.

Toby's foil is his brother, the hapless patriarch Walter Shandy, a rationalist who attempts to control all elements of risk in his son's life, even the physical pressure exerted in childbirth that might crush his manhood. It is science and determinism - and the newly invented forceps - that will keep the threatening realm of chaos at bay.

Like many texts from its time, Tristram Shandy weighs the values of the past to make sense of its uncertain present. Like Sterne's contemporary, Adam Smith, the novel portrays the "good soldier" as a touchstone of the moral values of fellow-feeling and self-sacrifice. Like the shopkeeper Thomas Turner, Walter Shandy finds order and security in quantifying. But there is a new kind of irony in Sterne's novel too: the consciousness of what it means to live the "strange absurdity" of a world that exchanges people for things. An absurdity, in the words of Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, that had brought the warring nation to sacrifice "her best and bravest subjects for raw silk, hemp and tobacco... her hardy veterans and honest trades-men... for a box of snuff or a silk petticoat".

Tristram Shandy emerges bumpily into the world as an Enlightenment child who must learn, as in Kant's famous dictum, to dare to think for himself. And if he accepts the "hobbyhorsical" eccentricities of his family for the pleasurable coping mechanisms that they are, his life and opinions are less tolerant of the strategies of those in power. The novel's strong vein of comic dissent is summed up in the figure of Yorick, Shakespearean joker and memento mori, whose Cervantic tilting at windmills has a serious edge. Yorick hates "gravity": not seriousness as such, but sententiousness, the hypocritical acting out of authority, and rhetorical seduction. "More honest, well-meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in one twelve-month, than by pocket-picking and shop-lifting in seven."

There is undoubtedly a delight in revealing that the emperor is wearing no clothes in Tristram Shandy, which uses all comic means available to poke fun at power, and where the military language of fortifications turns into a euphemistic shorthand for sex. But there is also seriousness to its playful method, as the narrator explains: "Tis an undercraft of authors to keep up a good understanding amongst words, as politicians do amongst men - not knowing how near they may be under a necessity of placing them to each other." If the novel is suspicious of those who imagine the world on our behalf, it also claims the right to a writerly freedom: "A lesson to the world 'to let people tell their stories their own way'."Sterne wrote that "Tristram Shandy... was made to baffle all criticism - and I will venture to rest the book on this ground - that it is either above the power or beneath the attention of any critic or hyper-critic whatsoever." Nineteenth-century English critics largely concurred; as one wrote in 1811 with a certain bravado, an explanation of his volumes "would defy the highest ingenuity of man". Many expressed a moral disgust that lasted until FR Leavis's dismissal of Sterne's "irresponsible (and nasty) trifling" in The Great Tradition in 1948. But writers claimed his comedy for their own: Byron's Don Juan aimed to be a poetical Tristram Shandy, and Sterne haunts the humour and sentimental protest of Dickens.

In Germany, Sterne's work was quickly celebrated by Goethe and the Romantic movement, influencing the young Karl Marx who wrote a novel in imitation, and defended his own comic dissent in struggles with the Prussian censor in Shandean terms: "If seriousness is not to come under Tristram Shandy's definition according to which it is a hypocritical behaviour of the body in order to conceal defects of the soul, then... I treat the ludicrous seriously when I treat it ludicrously, and the most serious immodesty of the mind is to be modest in the face of immodesty."

It was not until the early 20th century that writers and critics in Britain began to celebrate their own modernist precursor: for Virginia Woolf, Sterne's writing brought the reader "as close to life as we can be", while the wordsmithery of James Joyce, in the same tradition of comic protest as his "fellow countryman", knew the seriousness of Sterne's formal absurdity.

Postmodernist fiction also pays its debt, as in the first page of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, where the postcolonial birth of a child and a nation acts out a version of the famous Shandean episode of the clock. Yet if Tristram Shandy now appears, as one bibliographer put it, "postmodernist in every sense except the moment in which it was written", this is surely to miss the point. Some historical moments generate extraordinary forms of critical and artistic reflection, reminders of writerly freedom, in which comedy provides the most daring kind of engagement. It may be that current circumstances make it possible to read what is at stake in this 18th-century story of "a COCK and a BULL... And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard."

· Carol Watts lectures in English at Birkbeck College. She has just completed a book about Tristram Shandy and the Seven Years' war.

THE GUARDIAN


Sunday, August 3, 2003

Hugh Hefner / Fight for your right to party



Hugh Hefner

Fight for your right to party

Hollywood stars, champagne, bunny girls draped around sportsmen and title fight boxing in the back yard (women on the undercard, naturally): it's a tough life at the Playboy Mansion. Duncan Campbell watches Britain's latest boxing sensation slug it out in the unlikely setting of Hugh Hefner's pleasure dome

Duncan Campbell
Sunday 3 August 2003 23.39 BST



David Haye is being given his standard pre-fight neurological check-up to make sure that his faculties and reflexes are in working order. First, he has to touch his nose. 'My nose is really big, so that's easy,' he says. Then he has to put his feet together. Then he has to squeeze his fists open and shut. Then he has to subtract seven from 100. 'Ninety three.' Then he has to remember the words 'cow, apple and bus' long enough to repeat them to the satisfaction of his examiner. Then comes the clincher.
'Do you know where you are right now?'
He laughs, as well he might.
'The Playboy Mansion.'
And this is indeed the unlikely venue for the fifth professional bout of the handsome and savvy boxer from south London. Haye is already being described as a fighter in the style of Sugar Ray Robinson and one of Britain's finest prospects. He has arrived in Los Angeles on this July night after four knock-out victories in his first four fights. He has a silver medal as a heavyweight from the 2001 world amateur championships in Belfast and a 10-fight contract from the BBC. What better place to display his talent than the house that Hugh Hefner built?
The mansion is on Charing Cross Road but there are no second-hand book shops and noisy Chinese restaurants on this street, just big houses built in the classic Beverly Hills style. That is to say, mock-Tudor, mock-Elizabethan, mock-colonial, mock-mock, all with the 'armed response' signs that denote both the promise of the local Bel Air security company and the paranoia of the area.
The mansion is mock-baronial, complete with zoo and waterfall, grotto and shady cypresses, cinema and hot tubs and a traffic sign on the driveway that reads 'Playmates at Play'. Tonight is a Playboy boxing night, the third time that Hef has opened his grounds to the sports television channel ESPN to host half a dozen bouts in the garden.

Top of the bill is a middleweight title fight - although the titles on offer are largely meaningless - but we will also have a chance to see David Haye strut his stuff at cruiserweight and watch a couple of women's bouts.
Haye is standing on the tennis court at the back of the mansion where his examination has been taking place. He is remarkably relaxed.
'It's definitely the strangest venue I've ever fought in but I'd rather be here than in some shoddy hall somewhere.'
He has had plenty of these in his amateur career, the worst, he thinks, in Poland - 'a real dive, like a school gym' - where there were holes in a slippery ring. In two weeks time he will be back in England, fighting in Bethnal Green.
'It'll be a bit of a contrast but I'm looking forward to it.'
Los Angeles is in the midst of one of those warm spells that seem to last from around early January to late December but heat up slightly around July and August. Haye has never fought in the open air before. He is excited tonight, he says, because Roy Jones, the WBA and WBC heavyweight champion, will be there. Jones and Evander Holyfield are the fighters he most admires. His attentive trainer and manager, Adam Booth, who looks more like a young Hollywood television producer than the traditional gnarled cornerman, moves back into view to prepare his charge for the fray, so I head off towards the ring.
The first person I pass is a short man with unfeasibly black hair dressed in one of those pleated safari suits favoured by the heavier members of The Sopranos. He is on his mobile. 'Hey,' he is saying, 'you'll never guess where I am! The Playboy Mansion! Yes! No kidding!' The guests are about to arrive for the night and the complimentary bar and the food stalls - hot dogs, tacos, hamburgers, popcorn - are already open.
The guest list is a mix of Hollywood and the aristocracy of American sport. James Caan, a regular, is here, as is Kato Kaelin who is famous, well, because he was living in O.J. Simpson's garage at the time of Nicole Simpson's murder and has since managed to parlay those 14 and a half minutes of fame into a minor television career. There is the athlete Marion Jones and former basketball star Julius 'Dr J' Erving; Britain's heavyweight hopeful is here, an immaculately turned out Audley Harrison; and current players from many of the country's basketball and football sides. There are enough members of the LA Lakers, San Antonio Spurs, New Jersey Nets, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and San Diego Chargers here to launch a couple of franchises.

Since I am not exactly familiar with all of America's sporting heroes, I am fortunate that Bryant Horowitz, a young butler at the mansion, generously agrees to act as my spotter. With each new sighting, he delivers a fresh name. No spotter is necessary for Hef.
Here he comes with his six girlfriends. He is dressed in his trademark style, which is to say that he not only looks like the cat's pyjamas, he is wearing them, along with his silk crimson black-lined robe and a pair of sunglasses so dark I can't see whether or not he is winking. The girlfriends are dressed in - well, the nice in-house photographer, Elayne Lodge, has been taking pictures so you can probably see for yourself.
Hef, who has just thrown his seventy-seventh birthday party and is about to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the magazine, is amiability itself.
'Boxing for me has always been a guilty pleasure,' he says. 'It's inconsistent with my general philosophy which is "make love, not war" - on every kind of level. I grew up with Joe Louis, who was an idol, and the first fight I ever listened to on the radio with my father was the first of the Schmeling fights.' (Louis lost to the German Max Schmeling in 1936, but beat him at the Yankee Stadium in New York in 1938.)
'I'm old enough to have been there with a lot of really exciting fighters,' says Hef, as people start to take their seats around the ring and a white peacock and an African crane perch on a neighbouring shrub to get a decent view. 'Sugar Ray Robinson and Sugar Ray Leonard and [Rocky] Marciano and, of course, Muhammad Ali. He's been here two or three times for promotional things. Lennox Lewis was here not too long ago but not boxing, hanging out for a Sunday afternoon. I have been an Oscar de la Hoya fan but I don't think that there's anyone at the moment who feeds my imagination.'
There are women on the bill tonight wearing boxing gloves rather than bunny ears and fluffy tails. What does he feel about that?
'I feel mixed about women's boxing,' he says. 'It's there as a novelty but I don't like to see women get hit, even when they're wearing gloves. If I see a female boxer really start to get hurt, I have a very different reaction to it and I think most people do.'

Would he throw in the towel on their behalf if they were getting too badly hurt? 'That opens up many possibilities,' he says, and ponders for a moment. 'Would I ever throw in the towel where a woman was concerned? I don't know.'
He puts up with a bit of joshing from an ESPN show host who asks him if he identifies with boxers because they all wear a robe, and did he ever think of getting, say, "Boom boom" embroidered on the back of his? He didn't.
The ESPN guy then tells Hef that he has thought up a fighting name for him: 'Hard Right Hef'. 'I like it,' says Hef politely.
The first fight is about to start and a Playmate is preparing to do the bunny-dip between the ropes and let us know that Round One is upon us. Teri (in pink), Lauren (in yellow) and Penelope (in green) will share the task. They get a bigger cheer than the boxers.
Waiting her turn is one of the women fighters, Jo Jo Wyman, tattooed, corn-row hairstyle, big smile. Her Mom and Dad, Don and Pat, have arrived from Las Vegas to see her.
'It's no big deal to me,' says Jo Jo of fighting here. 'But I usually fight at casinos on Indian reservations.'
A personal trainer and former kick-boxer, she has been a pro for five years. Don and Pat Wyman - 'we're constantly getting mixed up with Bill Wyman' - are very proud of her.
'The first kick-boxing fight, I couldn't look,' says Pat, whose niece was a bunny. She is pleased that her daughter is performing at Hef's mansion.
'It's wonderful of him to open up his home like this.'
The battles have commenced. Serious stuff. No jokes about rabbit punches for the ref. Monroe Denson Brooks, a middleweight from south LA, dispatches his opponent with the sounds of peacocks and spider-monkeys almost as loud as the post-round applause.
He says afterwards, gloves off, sweat still pouring, that he liked the setting: 'Fighting is like nature's call and the peacocks in the trees here - it's all nature. I feel like they've all come to see me.'

'No distractions,' he says. 'I didn't bring my girlfriend because I didn't want any distractions.'
Out of curiosity, I make a brief visit to the mansion's zoo where Genevieve Gawman, a model and part of the Playboy family, is sitting in front of one of the cages that houses the two spider monkeys, Pepe and Coco.
Genevieve says that Pepe likes stroking long hair. She is into animal rights, she says, and a vegan and is pretty fit herself, she adds, demonstrating flexed forearms, biceps and abs. There are squirrel monkeys there, too, and some other shifty little creatures that I can't identify. Agents, possibly?
Back past the ring and opposite the waterfall, Ivan Goldman, a columnist with The Ring and KO magazine, is sitting at a table drinking 12-year-old Scotch - which is only about six years younger than some of the Playmates who are now wandering around hand-in-hand with some of the sports stars.
Goldman says of Haye 'he looked good' in as much as you could tell in 54 seconds.
'The problem with British boxers is they don't move their heads and they don't move their feet,' he says. This would certainly seem to put them at a disadvantage. 'They've got balls, they've got heart but they're not tricky enough.'
He likened them to the English Redcoats in the French and Indian war of 1755, striding cheerfully into battle in formation and being picked off by a craftier enemy. What about Lennox Lewis, I ask. Well, he grew up in Canada, says Goldman.
We wonder if mermaids are going to appear in the grotto, something I am sure I read about somewhere, but there is no sign of them tonight. Then a woman without fluffy tail or bunny ears says that the bar is closing. The bar is closing! I'm not too bothered since I have to drive home and have been on soft stuff all night but I didn't realise that the bar ever closed at Hef's. I had imagined that there was a fountain dispensing Laphroaig from one jet and Moët from another if one could but find it. Time to go.
Safari Suit is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he finally found someone who did believe where he was. Or maybe he was trying to get a phone number off Coco or Pepe.
One day, maybe, David Haye will be a champ. Then Safari Suit and I will be able to tell whomever we can find at the end of a mobile phone that we were there that night at the Playboy Mansion, along with James Caan and the white peacock and the African crane and all those line-backers from Tampa Bay, when the world champion, David Haye, had his fastest ever professional victory. But will they believe us?